Why is Neowin not behind CloudFlare or similar  system?

By +Elі
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+Warwagon MVC

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On 24/01/2025 at 09:12, Elі said:

As the title says, why not use CloudFlare or another type of CDN?. I'm in America, and Neowin has become slow to load lately.

Thanks.

I haven't noticed it. Loads are pretty good here.

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On 24/01/2025 at 10:21, Warwagon said:

I haven't noticed it. Loads are pretty good here.

Perhaps it's some kind of routing problem. Here in Miami, it sometimes takes up to 10 seconds for the homepage to load. This does not happen for me with any other site I visit, and I use AT&T Fiber on a 2.5Gbps plan.

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On 24/01/2025 at 09:33, Elі said:

Perhaps it's some kind of routing problem. Here in Miami, it sometimes takes up to 10 seconds for the homepage to load. This does not happen for me with any other site I visit, and I'm on a 2.5Gbps plan.

I'm on a 1GB plan, and it loads pretty instantly.

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+Elі Subscriber²

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As I mentioned earlier, it could be a routing issue to the area where I live (Miami) since I do not have this issue with any other site and I visit a lot of sites. I doubt that it is related to a problem on my end, as everything else loads almost instantly for me. The problem with Neowin being slow for me started around perhaps 2 months ago. But who knows, perhaps some script on the site that my Antivirus/Firewall doesn't like is what's slowing it down. I'll have to investigate on that.

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+Nik Louch Subscriber²

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What's the hate on CloudFlare?  Doesn't it (on paper at least) improve resiliency, speed and availability?

On 24/01/2025 at 15:21, cork1958 said:

screw that stupid CloudFare

 

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On 24/01/2025 at 10:54, Dick Montage said:

What's the hate on CloudFlare?  Doesn't it (on paper at least) improve resiliency, speed and availability?

 

we use it in an enterprise scenario and it makes our response time faster because of caching... if a page is going slow they probably have some rule turned on or some security feature that tries to detect bots or other possible issues

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On 24/01/2025 at 10:54, Dick Montage said:

What's the hate on CloudFlare?  Doesn't it (on paper at least) improve resiliency, speed and availability?

 

Oh, it definitely does. We also host a Linux Spanish-speaking community site in Europe. The site is mostly intended for users in South America, Spain and North America. That site is behind CloudFlare, and it is hosted on a home fiber connection, and despite having an average of 7K unique visitors per day, it loads instantly, way faster than Neowin loads for me.

 

Not only that, CloudFlare instantly protects us against the constant bot and DDoS attacks. So just ignore the ignorant comments against CloudFlare, those who talk against it are just clueless people that don't even know exactly what CloudFlare offers.

On 24/01/2025 at 10:49, Warwagon said:

Iowa

Exactly, and I'm in Miami, like I said, routing issues in my area.

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On 24/01/2025 at 11:16, cork1958 said:

Not in Miami either and only have a lousy 400MB download, but loads instantly here.

Exactly, not in Miami either, Thanks for confirming my point.

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Nick H. Supervisor

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A contract that I work for use Clouflare for their smaller sites: situations where too much traffic will overload their server.

I have little knowledge about the server(s) that Neowin is hosted on, but I would say that it's probably better set up than the clients I deal with that insist on using Cloudflare, then get arsey when their clients complain about having to do a Captcha thing each time.

So generally speaking, there's no need for the added layer. If anything, there's a higher probability that people would turn around and report the Cloudflare block compared to a couple of seconds for the site to load.

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+Elі Subscriber²

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On 24/01/2025 at 12:43, Nick H. said:

A contract that I work for use Clouflare for their smaller sites: situations where too much traffic will overload their server.

I have little knowledge about the server(s) that Neowin is hosted on, but I would say that it's probably better set up than the clients I deal with that insist on using Cloudflare, then get arsey when their clients complain about having to do a Captcha thing each time.

So generally speaking, there's no need for the added layer. If anything, there's a higher probability that people would turn around and report the Cloudflare block compared to a couple of seconds for the site to load.

Then those clients have no clue how to configure CloudFare's firewall and protection settings. Nobody needs to click on any captcha unless you have an extreme configuration or region misconfiguration on their CloudFlare settings for those sites.

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On 24/01/2025 at 12:43, Nick H. said:

A contract that I work for use Clouflare for their smaller sites: situations where too much traffic will overload their server.

I have little knowledge about the server(s) that Neowin is hosted on, but I would say that it's probably better set up than the clients I deal with that insist on using Cloudflare, then get arsey when their clients complain about having to do a Captcha thing each time.

So generally speaking, there's no need for the added layer. If anything, there's a higher probability that people would turn around and report the Cloudflare block compared to a couple of seconds for the site to load.

to anyone who doesnt know you dont have to use the captcha, that's just one of their many features you can turn on or off for bot protection

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adrynalyne

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On 24/01/2025 at 08:21, cork1958 said:

Not slow at all here and screw that stupid CloudFare. Every site I go to that uses it is slow just to get to first page and a couple of those sites won't even work at first try.

Sounds like you are visiting sites that aren’t setup correctly. 

On 24/01/2025 at 09:14, cork1958 said:

Maybe on paper, but personally, not as far as what I've seen.

If setup correctly, it absolutely does all those things. We use Front Door (Microsoft’s competing product) but are looking at switching to CF. 

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On 24/01/2025 at 16:05, adrynalyne said:

Sounds like you are visiting sites that aren’t setup correctly. 

If setup correctly, it absolutely does all those things. 

you mean just signing up for cloudflare and turning all the things on doesn't just work right?  😂

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+Elі Subscriber²

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On 25/01/2025 at 10:18, Steven P. said:

Hi guys, we do use a CDN (Amazon) but just for images. In addition to this we serve cached pages to all guests.

Thank you, Steven; this might have been a cache issue after all. After totally cleaning up my cache and cookies, it's now fast again. So it does look like it was indeed my issue with expired cache on the browser or something like that. 

Thanks for responding and giving us an official response.

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On 25/01/2025 at 10:18, Steven P. said:

Hi guys, we do use a CDN (Amazon) but just for images. In addition to this we serve cached pages to all guests.

You're also CDNing your immutable files, CSS, and JS. Don't sell yourself short 😛

I only know that because I had to make special rules for neowin since your cdn uses neowin.com instead of neowin.net. 

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